In today's business climate, industry fortunes rise and fall on whether information is exchanged in an efficient manner. For example, cell phones, pagers, and the Internet have thrived because each technology allows businesses to exchange critical market information at a moment's notice. In addition, such technologies allow individuals to keep abreast of recent developments with family and friends. In short, many segments of our modern society require instant access to accurate, up-to-the-minute information.
Companies spend significant resources to develop modern communication systems that provide people with such information. As communication systems have matured, data rates have increased from 20 kilobits per second (Kb/s) in 1975 with dialup modems to 100 megabits per second (Mb/s) with modern VDSL and other network technologies. In other words, customers in today's “information age” can receive data approximately 5,000 times as fast as network customers of thirty years ago. To bring customers into this modern “information age”, developers have spent billions of dollars to develop network technology as we now know it. To continue to increase data rates at such a remarkable pace, communication systems developers will likely be required to spend significant capital resources for many years to come.
Multi-carrier channels are one particular technology used to provide high speed data connections over a transmission medium. In previous implementations, the configuration of the multi-carrier channel is based on a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measured during initialization (i.e., prior to data transfer). Thus, in these systems, if the noise in the system suddenly increases during data transfer, the multi-carrier channel is not properly configured to account for the noise and many symbols and data packets can be lost. In applications that have streaming data (e.g., IP TV, Voice over IP (VoIP)), users may be able to visually or audibly detect this lost data in the data stream. This is unacceptable for service providers.
Therefore, while the existing methods and systems for communication systems that use multi-channel communication channels are sufficient for their stated purpose, they are not sufficient to accurately account for sudden noise on the transmission medium during communication service. Thus, improved methods and systems are needed.